Top 5 Ways to Build Procurement Stakeholder Engagement

As Procurement, we generate value for the business in a number of ways. These all require Procurement stakeholder engagement:

• Stimulating supplier innovation

• Finding cost savings opportunities

• Negotiating terms & conditions that create better outcomes for the business

• Etc.

Without your internal customers' implication, it's almost impossible to generate value for the business. You are left in the dark with regards to business needs and requirements. Correctly sizing these elements is critical to defining how you will generate value.

So what are you to do when your stakeholders are not engaged to the level you need to be effective? Here are 5 tactics you can use to boost procurement stakeholder engagement within your business:

#5 - Organize a Procurement Requirements Review Meeting

One of the ways you can work on Procurement stakeholder engagement is with a quarterly (or monthly if more appropriate) procurement requirements / pain point review meeting.

This is effective even if you don’t have an ongoing sourcing project for your stakeholder’s category. It allows you to ask questions about the products and services that they use and how they could be better. What suppliers do they come from? Would it be better for you if X, Y or Z? The answers will give you leads to investigate how you can improve your internal client’s outcomes. It might require a new RFP or it could be as simple as making a few phone calls.

If you follow up after the meeting and deliver value, you can bet engagement will be higher with your stakeholders.

#4 - Have Lunch With Your Stakeholders

As you may have guessed while reading #5, building Procurement stakeholder engagement with your stakeholders is based on building the underlying trust in the relationship. So, what do you do if a stakeholder refuses your invitation for a requirements review? “I’m too busy.” “Maybe another time.” This means you need to work on trust before you work on Procurement.

That’s why the second method I am proposing is the good old fashioned lunch. If you are met with resistance to an initial requirements meeting, propose to simply get to know them a little better over the course of lunch. Make it impossible to refuse. If they are at another location, go to their location. They only have 30 minutes? No problem. You don’t seem like someone they want to collaborate with after the lunch? “You’ll never have to speak to me again!” Everyone has to eat.

Make the exercise about genuinely getting to know them. What is their backstory? How long have they been at the company? What were they doing before? What do they enjoy/find most difficult about their current role? I guarantee pain points will eventually pop up. Then it becomes a question finding an appropriate time to make your elevator pitch.

If they are concerned that Procurement will simply be another bottleneck in their operations, you need to be ready to demonstrate how you will deliver the promised value.

#3 - Create an Internal Procurement Newsletter

Once you’ve initially engaged a stakeholder, the challenge then becomes how you will keep them engaged on an ongoing basis. One great method that requires no additional technology is creating an internal, highly contextual monthly newsletter for your key stakeholders (similar to the one you get monthly when you subscribe to Pure Procurement).

Create an email format you will reuse from month to month (i.e. ongoing projects with status, supplier spotlight of the month, key procurement department announcements, key industry news, etc.). Provide VALUE, be consistent and, after a few months, seek feedback. I’m certain you will find that for a portion of your stakeholders, they really appreciate the time taken to inform them. It also keeps you top of mind for their next procurement needs.

#2 - Shadow Your Stakeholders on Their Turf

Another technique you can use to boost Procurement stakeholder engagement is shadowing. If your stakeholders’ main opposition to meeting with you is lack of time, offer to shadow them, a colleague or a resource on their team for a day or two to get a sense of their day-to-day reality.

From there, use your observation skills to see what value you could bring to the table with your procurement expertise. If they are so strapped for time it is probably because they are dealing with lots of exceptions/firefighting. Can any of these be attributed to goods/services purchased? What about the underlying purchasing process (e.g. a really inefficient goods receipt process)?

Sell the exercise as having zero downside for your stakeholder: “I will spend a day getting to know you without disturbing you. I’ll show you any interesting findings. You get the final say on whether we launch a procurement initiative together as a result of my findings”. If you remove the obstacles in the way of your involvement in good faith, you should be able to open doors that have been closed so far.

#1 - Seek Executive Support

You’ve tried organizing a requirements review session, a lunch, a newsletter and a shadowing session but your stakeholders are still not giving you a inch to work with them? That’s when it’s time to seek management support.

When you’re not able to get an opening to start building trust yourself, you may be able to leverage the trust others have built up with your stakeholder. Chances are your manager will know the best way to approach the given team/business unit to reach a given outcome. An introduction/follow-up from a manager can go a long way to opening up the dialogue.

Your management will certainly help you if you illustrate the steps you’ve already taken to attempt to build Procurement stakeholder engagement. After all, they should be the people who most want to see you succeed. After all, you are working to help them reach their organizational objectives!

Conclusion

Regardless of the tactic you use to build Procurement stakeholder engagement, remember that you are always working on improving two things:

• Trust

• Value you generate

You build trust by understanding your stakeholder and delivering on your promises. Your promises need to be linked to generating value for your stakeholder. Do this and you will eventually break through any barriers.

What other tactics have you used to keep your Procurement stakeholders engaged? How successful were you at generating long term engagement? What were the keys to your results? Let me know in the comments.